Benefits delayed for SEAL Team 6 shooter

The Shooter said the CIA operative broke down in tears at the sight of bin Laden’s body back at the Afghanistan base and that he gave her his magazine, which still contained 27 shots, as a souvenir.

“We looked down and I asked, ‘Is that your guy?’ ” he said.

After the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the Shooter served one more deployment in Afghanistan and then left the military, a few years shy of his pension.

“I wanted to see my children graduate and get married,” he said. He hoped to sleep through the night for the first time in years. “I was burned out,” he said. “And I realized that when I stopped getting an adrenaline rush from gunfights, it was time to go.”

Now out of the military, the Shooter has separated from his wife, but the two still live together for financial reasons. Since the raid in Abbottabad, the story says, “he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house.” He keeps a shotgun on the armoire and a knife on the dresser. The military provides no protection.

He says his disability claim is less about the money it would provide than the right to free health care it would bring. While the VA now provides five years of virtually free health care to all honorably discharged Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, they can face bureaucratic nightmares later on if their conditions are not deemed service-connected.

Despite 16 years serving his country, the Shooter says he has never accessed – or been informed of – unique services available to Special Forces veterans, including an effort called the Care Coalition launched by Special Operations Command in 2005.

The Shooter also says he has seen no evidence that he has been routed through a special track for disability claims that the Department of Veterans Affairs set up for Special Forces veterans in 2009.

Under this policy, if a veteran files a disability claim based on involvement in a secret mission, VA claims examiners are supposed to turn files over to a special liaison at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., where Special Operations Command is located.

The move was meant to speed processing of claims by Special Forces veterans, who had difficulty proving their injuries were caused by military service because of the classified nature of their work.